Artist:

Xander Harris

Austin, Texan Justin Sweatt’s decision to choose Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s second best friend as a recording moniker reveals something rare about the inspirations behind his horror-fied, post-industrial synthesizer music: a sense of humor. In a time of so much exceedingly dour electronic music, Xander Harris’s sinister-yet-celebratory stance stands out. His well-received debut, Urban Gothic, even landed in FACT’s Best 50 Of 2011 list, who described the LP as “perfectly balancing tenebrous atmospherics with moments of high italo camp.”